Mr Fosdyke was the local M.F.H.
I asked if Lady Montdore had had an inkling of all this before, knowing really quite well that she had not, as everything always came straight out with her and neither Polly nor Boy would have had one moment’s peace.
‘Simply no idea at all, it was a complete bolt from the blue. Poor Sonia, we know she has her faults but I can’t think she has deserved this. She said Boy had always been very kind about taking Polly off her hands when they were in London, to the Royal Academy and so on, and Sonia was pleased because the child never seemed to have anybody to amuse her. Polly wasn’t a satisfactory girl to bring out, you know. I’m very fond of her myself, I always have been, but you could see that Sonia was having a difficult time in many ways. Oh, poor Sonia, I do feel – now children, will you please go up and wash your fishy hands before tea?’
‘This is the very limit, you’re obviously going to say things while we’re away. What about Fanny’s fishy hands, then?’
‘Fanny’s grown-up, she’ll wash her hands when she feels like it. Off you go.’
When they were safely out of the room she said, in horror, to Davey and me,
‘Just imagine, Sonia, who had completely lost control of herself (not that I blame her), sort of hinted to me that Boy had once been her own lover.’
‘Darling Sadie, you are such an innocent,’ Davey said, laughing. ‘It’s a famous famous love affair which everybody except you has known all about for years. I sometimes think your children are right and you don’t know the facts of life.’
‘Well, all I can say is, I’m thankful I don’t. How perfectly hateful. Do you think Patricia knew?’
‘Of course she did and she was only too glad of it. Before his affair with Sonia began, Boy used to make Patricia chaperone all the dismal little debutantes that he fancied, and they would sob out broken hearts on her shoulder, and beg her to divorce him, very last thing he wanted, naturally. She had a lot of trouble with him, you know.’
‘I remember a kitchen maid,’ Aunt Sadie said.
‘Oh yes, it was one thing after another before Sonia took him on, but she had some control over him and Patricia’s life became much easier and more agreeable, until her liver got so bad.’
‘All the same,’ I said, ‘we know he still went for little girls, because look at Linda.’
‘Did he?’ said Aunt Sadie, ‘I have sometimes wondered – Ugh! What a man! How you can think there’s anything to be said for him, Davey, and how can you pretend he hadn’t the faintest idea Polly was in love with him? If he made up to Linda like that, of course he must have done the same with her.
‘Well, Linda’s not in love with him, is she? He can’t be expected to guess that because he strokes the hair of a little girl when she’s fourteen she’s going to insist on marrying him when she grows up. Bad luck on a chap I call it.’
‘Davey, you’re hopeless! And if I didn’t know quite well that you’re only teasing me I should be very cross with you.’
‘Poor Sonia,’ said Davey. ‘I feel for her, her daughter and her lover at a go – well, it often happens but it can’t ever be very agreeable.’
‘I’m sure it’s the daughter she minds,’ said Aunt Sadie, ‘she hardly mentioned Boy, she was moaning and groaning about Polly, so perfectly beautiful, being thrown away like that. I should be just the same, I couldn’t bear it for any of mine – that old fellow, they’ve known all their lives, and it’s worse for her, Polly being the only one.’
‘And such a treasure, so much the apple of their eye. Well, the more I see of life the more profoundly thankful I am not to have any children.’
‘Between two and six they are perfect,’ said my aunt, rather sadly I thought, ‘after that I must say they are a worry, the funny little things. Then another horror for Sonia is wondering what went on all those years between Polly and Boy. She says last night she couldn’t sleep for thinking of times when Polly pretended to have been to the hairdresser and obviously hadn’t – that sort of thing – she says it’s driving her mad.’
‘It needn’t,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m quite sure nothing ever happened. From various things I can remember Polly saying to me, I’m quite sure her love for the Lecturer must always have seemed hopeless to her. Polly’s very good, you know, and she was very fond of her aunt.’
‘I daresay you’re right, Fanny. Sonia herself said that when she came down and found Polly sitting on the floor she thought at once “the girl looks as if she had been making love”, and said she’d never seen her look like that before, flushed, her eyes simply huge and a curl of tousled hair hanging over her forehead – she was absolutely struck by her appearance, and then Polly told her –’
I could so well imagine the scene, Polly sitting, it was a very characteristic attitude with her, on the rug, getting up slowly, stretching, and then carelessly and gracefully implanting the cruel banderillas, the first movement of a fight that could only end in death.
‘What I guess,’ I said, ‘is that he stroked a bit when she was fourteen and she fell in love then without him having any idea of it. Polly always bottles things up, and I don’t expect anything more happened between them until the other evening.’
‘Simply too dreadful,’ said Aunt Sadie.
‘Anyhow, Boy can’t have expected to get engaged there and then, or he wouldn’t have had all that talk about the Infanta’s letter and the gravestone, would he?’ said Davey. ‘I expect what Fanny says is true.’
‘You’ve been telling things – it is unfair – Fanny’s hands are still foully fishy.’ The children were back, out of breath.
‘I do wonder what Uncle Matthew and Lord Montdore talked about in the business-room,’ I said. I could not imagine such a tale being unfolded between those two, somehow.
‘They topicked,’ said Aunt Sadie. ‘I told Matthew afterwards, I’ve never seen anybody so angry. But I haven’t told you yet what it was that Sonia really came about. She’s sending Polly here for a week or two.’
‘No I’ we all cried in chorus.
‘Oh, the utter fascination!’ said Jassy. ‘But why?’
‘Polly wants to come, it was her idea, and Sonia can’t endure the sight of her for the present, which I can well understand. I must say I hesitated at first, but I am very fond of that little girl, you know, I really love her, and if she stays at home her mother will have driven her into an elopement within a week. If she comes here we might be able to influence her against this horrible marriage – and I don’t mean you, children. You’ll please try and be tactful for once in your lives.’
‘I will be,’ said Jassy, earnestly, ‘it’s dear little Viet, you must speak to, there’s no tack in her, and personally I think it was a great mistake ever to have told her at all – ow – help – help – Sadie, she’s killing me –’
‘I mean both of you,’ said Aunt Sadie, calmly, taking no notice whatever of the dog-fight in progress, ‘you can talk about the chubb at dinner, that ought to be a safe subject.’
‘What?’ they said, stopping the fight, ‘she’s not coming today?’
‘Yes, she is. After tea.’
‘Oh, what a thrill. Do you think the Lecturer will have himself carried into the house dressed up as a sack of wood?’
‘They shan’t meet under my roof,’ Aunt Sadie said firmly. ‘I promised Sonia that, but of course, I pointed out that I can’t control what Polly does elsewhere, I can only leave that to her own sense of what is in good taste, while she is staying with me.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
POLLY soon made it clear that Aunt Sadie need have no misgivings about her behaviour while at Alconleigh. Her self-possession was complete, the only exterior indication that her life was at a crisis being an aura of happiness which transformed her whole aspect. Nothing she said or did was at all out of the usual or could have led anybody to suppose that she had recently been involved in scenes of such intensity, and it was obvious that she held no communication of any sort with Boy. She never we
nt near the telephone, she did not sit all day scribbling letters, received very few, and none, so the children informed me, with a Silkin postmark; she hardly ever left the house and then only to get a breath of air with the rest of us, certainly not in order to go for long solitary walks which might end in lovers’ meetings.
Jassy and Victoria, romantic like all the Radletts, found this incomprehensible and most disappointing. They had expected to be plunged into an atmosphere of light opera, and had supposed that the Lecturer would hang, sighing but hopeful, about the precincts, that Polly would hang, sighing but expectant, out of a moonlit window, to be united, and put on the first stage of their journey to Gretna Green, by the ingenuity and enterprise of their two young friends.
They lugged a mattress and stocks of food into the Hon’s cupboard in case Boy wanted to hide there for a day or two. They had thought of everything, so they informed me, and were busy making a rope ladder. But Polly would not play.
‘If you have any letters for the post, Polly, you know what I mean, a letter – we could easily run down to the village with it on our bikes.’
‘Darling, you are kind, but they’ll go just as quickly if I put them on the hall table, won’t they?’
‘Oh, of course, you can do that if you like, but everybody will read the envelope and I just thought – Or any messages? There’s a telephone in the village post-office, rather public, but you could talk in French.’
‘I don’t know French very well. Isn’t there a telephone here?’
‘Oh, it’s a brute, extensions all over the place. Now there’s a hollow tree in the park quite big enough for a man to hide in – quite dry and comfy – shall we show you?’
‘You must, one day. Too cold to go out today, I think.’
‘You know there’s a frightfully nice little temple in a wood the other side of the river, would you like us to take you there?’
‘Do you mean Faulkner’s Folly, where they have the meets? But, Jassy, I know it quite well, I’ve often seen it. Very pretty.’
‘What I really mean is the key is kept under a stone, and we could show you exactly where so that you could go inside.’
‘There’s nothing to see inside except cobwebs,’ I said, ‘it was never finished, you know.’
Jassy made a furious face at me. ‘Tackless,’ she muttered.
‘Let’s go there next summer, darlings,’ said Polly, ‘for a picnic. I can’t enjoy anything out of doors in this weather, my eyes water too much.’
The children slouched away, discouraged.
Polly exploded with laughter. ‘Aren’t they too heavenly? But I don’t really see the point of making all these great efforts to spend a few minutes with Boy in freezing cold temples, or to write to him about nothing at all when very soon I shall be with him for the whole rest of my life. Besides, I don’t want to annoy Lady Alconleigh when she is being such an angel to have me here.’
Aunt Sadie herself, while applauding Polly’s attitude, which relieved her of any need to worry, found it most unnatural.
‘Isn’t it strange,’ she said, ‘you can see by looking at her that she is very happy, but if it weren’t for that nobody could guess that she was in love. My girls always get so moony, writing reams all day, jumping when the telephone bell rings and so on, but there’s none of that with Polly. I was watching her last night when Matthew put Che Gelida Maniua on the gramophone, she didn’t look a bit sentimental. Do you remember what an awful time we had with Linda when Tony was in America – never out of Hoods?’
But Polly had been brought up in a harder school for the emotions than had the Radletts, with a mother determined to find out everything that was in her mind and to mould her very thoughts to her own wishes. One could only admire the complete success with which she had countered both of these aims. Clearly her character had a steely quality incomprehensible to my cousins, blown hither and thither as they were upon the winds of sentiment.
I managed to have a few long talks alone with Polly at this time, but it was not very easy. Jassy and Victoria hardly left us for a single minute, so frightened were they of missing something; furthermore, they were shameless eavesdroppers, while hair-brushing chats at bedtime were ruled out by the fact of my so recent marriage. Mercifully the children went riding every day, when an hour or so of peace could be counted on; there was no hunting just then because of foot-and-mouth disease.
Gradually the whole thing came out. Polly’s reserve, it is true, never really broke down, but every now and then the landscape was illuminated and its character exposed to view by flashes of startling frankness. It all seemed to have been very much as we had thought. For instance, I said to her something about when Boy proposed and she replied, quite carelessly,
‘Oh, Boy never proposed to me at all, I don’t think he ever would have, being that kind of a person – I mean, so wonderfully unselfish and thinking that it matters for me not being left things in wills and all that rubbish. Besides, he knows Mummy so well and he knew just what a hullabaloo she would make – he couldn’t face it for me. No no, I always realized that I should have to do the proposing, and I did. It wasn’t very difficult.’
So Davey was right, no doubt. The idea of such a marriage would never have entered the Lecturer’s head if it had not been put there by Polly herself. After that it would clearly have been beyond flesh and blood to resist such a prize, greatest beauty and greatest heiress of her generation, potential mother of the children, the little half-Hamptons, he had always longed for. He could never have said no once it all lay at his feet waiting to be pocketed.
‘After all, I’ve loved him ever since I can remember. Oh, Fanny – isn’t being happy wonderful?’
I felt just the same myself and was able to agree with all my heart. But her happiness had a curiously staid quality, and her love seemed less like the usual enchanted rapture of the young girl, newly engaged, than a comfortable love of old establishment, love which does not need to assert itself by continually meeting, corresponding with and talking about its object, but which takes itself, as well as his response, for granted. The doubts and jealousies which can be so painful and make a hell almost of a budding love affair did not seem to have occurred to Polly, who took the simple view that she and Boy had hitherto been kept apart by one insuperable barrier, and that this barrier having been removed, the path to lifelong bliss lay at their feet.
‘What can it matter if we have a few more weeks of horrid waiting when we are going to live together all the rest of our lives and be buried in the same grave?’
‘Fancy being buried in the same grave with the Lecturer,’ Jassy said, coming into my bedroom before luncheon.
‘Jassy, I think it’s too awful the way you listen at doors.’
‘Don’t tease, Fan, I intend to be a novelist (child novelist astounds the critics), and I’m studying human nature like mad.’
‘I really ought to tell Aunt Sadie.’
‘That’s it. Join the revereds, now you are married, just like Louisa. No, but seriously Fanny, think of sharing a grave with that old Lecturer, isn’t it disgusting? And anyway, what about Lady Patricia?’
‘Well, she’s nice and snug in one all to herself, lined with heather. She’s quite all right.’
‘I think ifs shocking.’
Meanwhile, Aunt Sadie was doing what she could to influence Polly, but as she was much too shy to speak to hex directly on such intimate subjects as sex and marriage she used an oblique method of letting fall an occasional reflection, hoping that Polly would apply it to her own particular case.
‘Always remember, children, that marriage is a very intimate relationship, it’s not just sitting and chatting to a person, there are other things, you know.’
Boy Dougdale, to her, was physically repulsive, as I think he generally was to those women who did not find him irresistible, and she thought that if Polly could be brought to a realization of the physical aspect of marriage she might be put off him for good.
As Jassy ver
y truly observed, however, Isn’t Sadie a scream, she simply doesn’t realize that what put Polly on the Lecturer’s side in the first place must have been all those dreadful things he did to her, like he once tried to with Linda and me, and that now what she really wants most in the world is to roll and roll and roll about with him in a double bed.’
‘Yes, poor Sadie, she’s not too hot on psychology,’ said Victoria. ‘Now I should say the only hope of curing Polly’s uncle-fixation is to analyse her. Shall we see if she’d let us try?’
‘Children, I absolutely forbid you to,’ I said firmly, ‘and if you do I promise I’ll tell Aunt Sadie about the eavesdropping, so there.’
I knew what dreadful questions they would ask Polly and that as she was rather prim she would be shocked and angry. They were very much taken up at this time with the study and practice of psycho-analysis. They got hold of a book on the subject (‘Elliston’s library, would you believe it?’) and several days of peace ensued while they read it out to each other in the Hon’s cupboard, after which they proceeded to action.
‘Come and be analysed,’ was their parrot cry. ‘Let us rid you of the poison that is dogging your mental processes, by telling you all about yourselves. Now, suppose we begin with Fa, he’s the simplest proposition in the house.’
‘What d’you mean, simple?’
‘ABC to us. No no, not your hand you dear old thing, we’ve grown out of palmistry ages ago, this is science.’
‘All right, let’s hear it.’
‘Well, so then you’re a very straightforward case of frustration – wanted to be a gamekeeper, were obliged to be a lord – followed, as is usual, by the development of over-compensation so that now you’re a psycho-neurotic of the obsessive and hysterical type engrafted on to a paranoid and schizoid personality.’
‘Children, you are not to say these things about your father.’
‘Scientific truths are nothing to object to, Sadie, and in our experience everybody enjoys learning about themselves. Would you care for us to test your intelligence level with an ink blot, Fa?’